# Keypoints as Dynamic Centroids for Unified Human Pose and Segmentation

Source: [Keypoints as Dynamic Centroids for Unified Human Pose and Segmentation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa78991e209131cea7938b>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:57:16.491Z

Authors: Niaz Ahmad, Jawad Khan, Kang G. Shin, Youngmoon Lee, Guanghui Wang

Published: 2025-05-17T20:05:34.000Z

## Abstract

The dynamic movement of the human body presents a fundamental challenge for human pose estimation and body segmentation. State-of-the-art approaches primarily rely on combining keypoint heatmaps with segmentation masks but often struggle in scenarios involving overlapping joints or rapidly changing poses during instance-level segmentation. To address these limitations, we propose Keypoints as Dynamic Centroid (KDC), a new centroid-based representation for unified human pose estimation and instance-level segmentation. KDC adopts a bottom-up paradigm to generate keypoint heatmaps for both easily distinguishable and complex keypoints and improves keypoint detection and confidence scores by introducing KeyCentroids using a keypoint disk. It leverages high-confidence keypoints as dynamic centroids in the embedding space to generate MaskCentroids, allowing for swift clustering of pixels to specific human instances during rapid body movements in live environments. Our experimental evaluations on the CrowdPose, OCHuman, and COCO benchmarks demonstrate KDC's effectiveness and generalizability in challenging scenarios in terms of both accuracy and runtime performance. The implementation is available at: https://sites.google.com/view/niazahmad/projects/kdc.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12130>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12130.pdf>)
